If you have a question about this talk, please contact Ruth Rushworth.

This innovative roundtable discussion will draw on the expertise of curators, filmmakers, academics and museum professionals to explore what both real films and the ‘imaginary film’ of the spaces of the Fitzwilliam Museum might look like. This exciting event will also give a rare opportunity to see films made in the Fitzwilliam Museum, within the galleries of Museum itself.

Inspired by the cultural critic André Malraux’s idea of the Museum without Walls, or the ‘imaginary museum’, the roundtable will turn the idea of an imaginary museum on its head once again. If Malraux’s idea of the museum is one produced by pathways in the imagination, what would a version of that imaginary space look like in film? What would that ‘imaginary film’ be?

The roundtable will explore such questions as:

What would the imaginary film of works in a particular gallery in the Fitzwilliam Museum do? What kinds of visual and cultural narratives would it tell?

What exploratory links could this imaginary film make between the spaces of the Museum, the art works of that space, the dialogues between works hung in the space, and the relationships between medium of the art works and the medium of film itself?

Chaired by Jenny Chamarette (Research Fellow, University of Cambridge).